Saturday, April 23, 2011

Using Google's Recipe View for Family History

Google has a new feature to help find recipes online called Recipe View.
I don't like to just find names and dates of my ancestors. I like to write about my family history and the various cultures of my ancestors.

Cooking, to me, is a big part of culture, and because of this, I've always included family recipes in the stories of my ancestors. Unfortunately, although I know what dishes my grandmothers and great-grandmothers cooked, none of these recipes were ever written down.

Google Recipe View can now help me find recipes close to my family recipes. If I know my Hungarian grandmother cooked goulash with paprika and poppy seeds but without ketchup (which a lot of online recipes seem to include - ugh!), Recipe View helps me find a recipe meeting my criteria. It not only allows me to choose the ingredients in the recipe, but it allows me to choose ingredients I know are NOT in the recipe by clicking on the "Yes" or "No" ingredient check boxes in the left column.

Google Recipe View helps me choose a recipe among the search results by showing clearly marked ingredients and pictures without having to go into each website to check out the ingredients of the recipe.

To get to Recipe View, click on the Recipes link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes such as Goulash or Schnitzel or can search for more open-ended topics that feature a holiday or event, such as German Christmas recipes or St. Patrick's Day in Ireland recipes or Easter Bread or even Bastille Day recipes.

You filter search results based on your ideal ingredients, cooking time and calorie count using the recipe tools on the left hand side of the page. For cultural recipes, I don't use the cooking time or calorie count check boxes. I don't think my ancestors worried about these either.

Sometimes, I have found it helps to add the word authentic to the recipe namewhen searching to better find a historical recipe. You can try searching for specific recipes such as Authentic French Crepes or Authentic German Sauerbraten or Authentic New England Clam Chowder

For genealogy webmasters and bloggers: Recipe View is based on data from rich snippets markup. If you publish recipes of your ancestors, you can add markup to your web pages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View. This will help those genealogists like me searching for recipes that our ancestors used to make.

2 comments:

Loved this post - I am working on English, Scots, German and Polish roots.You would be amazed at how you can link specific geographical areas to recipes. Have you found any interesting cookbooks? I like your idea of "authentic"!J